Team:UCL/Humans/Soci/5

Goodbye AzoDye: Addressing Environmental Hazards of the Classical Industrial Society

The vision to embrace the merits of technological innovation to enable the process of ecological modernisation, has been the subject of critique by risk society theorists who argue that technological optimism does not appear to be compatible with the urgency of some environmental issues (Mol and Jänicke 2009). In contrast, the risk society would experience scientific and technological achievement above all as being at the root of many latent environmental perversities. The production demands of industrial societies have brought nature into play as the industrial hazards affected the environment. Consequently, additional political effort and economic investments were needed to manage risk while upholding the initial economic activity. The innovation of science therefore also meant that there were unforeseen harmful effects in terms of how this implicated the state of the natural environment (Rutherford 2009).

With the Goodbye AzoDye Project, the team is in fact piecing together a genetically engineered micro-organism that can help to prevent the spread of hazardous wastewater pollution. In the meantime, it brings attention to an environmental problem that is typical for the industrial society in its ongoing quest to strive for further modern development. Nevertheless, the issue of textile dye effluents was only problematized after it was defined and explained in terms of the existence of actual risks related to what was happening. It was only possible to have the problem recognised as such after it was established that there was a connection between the pathogenic activity of the effluents in rivers and their release from that plants from which they originated. The team therefore needed to base the motivations for their project on studies that could demonstrate a correlation between the two. Some of the most salient studies focussed on the case of the textile dye processing plant along the Cristais River near São Paulo, Brazil, where increasing evidence was found linking the azo dye effluents in the industrial wastewater to the mutagenic and carcinogenic properties and effects of the water in the surrounding area of the plant. In the study conducted by Alves de Lima et al. (2007), the effluent was disposed at about 6 km from a drinking water treatment plant where around 60,000 people were exposed to drinking water of which the quality was compromised. The concentrations of effluent in the water (3%) appeared to be highly mutagenic in Salmonella (Alves de Lima et al. 2007; de Aragão Umbuzeiro et al. 2005, 2004).

Hence, in order for the effluent to be considered a risk, the ecological hazard at hand needs to have calculable and predictable qualities. In that way the necessary statistical knowledge can be produced to actually establish the risk through the measurements that have been done. The next step, then, is to develop the appropriate strategy for responsive action to mitigate that risk (Beck 1996; Giddens 1999). The aforementioned studies therefore suggest in their scientific publications that a language of risk is necessary to understand the problem:

"The water used for human consumption presented mutagenic activity related to nitro-aromatics and aromatic amines compounds probably derived from the cited textile processing plant effluent discharge. Therefore, it is important to evaluate the possible risks involved in the human consumption of this contaminated water" (Alves de Lima et al. 2007: 53)

"...human and ecological risks associated with the release of dye processing plant effluents should be more fully investigated, especially where the resultant water is taken for human consumption" (de Aragão Umbuzeiro et al. 2005: 55).

So what is typical of the modern industrial society is that it has created the knowledge in the areas in which a risk is manufactured from statistical inference. This leads to a situation where “the blinkers of individuali[s]ation drop off”, meaning that the emergence of hazardous effects, that harmed an increasing number of individuals, could finally be attributed to a source that posed a threat to a whole group of people. Prior to this, there was no way of explaining why individual cases began to suffer from something that was instigated beyond their knowledge and action. In other words, the prevalence of cancer in the area of the Cristais River ceased to be a matter of accumulating but unrelated individual cases, but could subsequently be explained through the risk that was measured. Team member Georgia also stated that this has been important to uncover an environmental problem without which they as a team would not even have been made aware of an issue they could work on:

“It’s really just because azo dyes have been around for so long, I feel like the problem hasn’t really been discovered enough, because they’ve been there since we’ve started diagnose cancer properly so they’ve kind of like been travelling along this road together and we haven’t even been able to separate them before. Now we are kind of like zooming in on the problem and we can do like “hey, wait, maybe cancer is more prevalent because of the way we’re dealing with these dyes that literally just split into the worst carcinogens we have””.

Participating in the Risk Society with Synthetic Biology

The team’s discourse on the hazards of classic industrial society is of considerable importance because, at the same time, they are also confronted with a public environmental discourse that relates to their use of synthetic biology. However, the nature of the ecological risk pertaining synthetic biology is considerably different from conventional industrial risk. The latter, for instance, is predominantly characterized by threats that mainly manifest themselves on a local level, which makes them clear in the limited scope in which they can have a potentially harmful effect. In the case of the Cristais River, the affected population of the relevant ecological system only concerned those organisms consuming the water of the river. In addition, local industrial pollution is often described in terms of the degree of health or environmental risk that is involved, which in this case means the extent to which there are carcinogenic implications of leaching effluent. Furthermore, in such a case of local industrial pollution, there is a higher probability that drawing a connection between the impact of the risk and the source can be done in a linear and hence easily measurable fashion (Beck 1996).

In contrast to the relatively more straightforward approach required in the Cristais River case, such ‘high-risk’ technologies as synthetic biology, or genetic engineering in general, tend to supersede such clear and localized risks when considering the scope of their impact. Their difference can be so great that authors like Ulrich Beck would portray the implications of something like synthetic biology in an almost apocalyptic manner. One of the reasons for this is that it would, for example, be impossible to trace the origins of synthetically engineered micro-organisms in the open environment, making it difficult to invoke accountability as to who can be held responsible for misusing or even exploiting the technology (Blowers 1997). Another reason is that, with synthetic biology, risks have been rendered “incalculable and unpredictable in the risk society”, thus giving leeway to the accumulation of increasing uncertainty (Beck 1996: 160; Cohen 1997). In much the same way, the International Risk Governance Council would assert that the emerging risks related to synthetic biology are still largely underdetermined notwithstanding the possibility of the considerable impact that it might have (IRGC 2010; Zhang et al. 2011).

With regard to the potential large-scale risk factor, Beck (1992a) argues that “science hovers blindly above the boundaries of threats” because “testing comes after application and production precedes research” (Beck 1992a: 108). The logic of scientific research that Beck illustrates shows how safety implications are expected to become known even before the issue can be fully understood. Therefore, scientific experts have taken up the ‘freedom of application’ as inherently part of their scientific liberties to be autonomous in their ability to oversee technological practices (Beck 1999: 61). The myriad of innovative initiatives that stem out of this hence become irrepressible while the accountability for wrongful practice remains unobtainable. This ‘social explosiveness of hazard’ and the increasing prevalence of risks has triggered the emergence of a reflexive fear out of uncertainty and ignorance associated to these risks (Barry 1999; Beck 1996, 1992b: 165). As a consequence, the incentive is produced to become even more dependent on expertise. This, subsequently, makes it possible for scientific experts to claim a monopoly to address the environmental hazard by exercising a public discourse of scientific practice revolving around minimal risk as they feel that increased production of scientific knowledge relieves society from growing uncertainty (Beck 1992a; Blowers 1997). This aspect was made explicit in the team as well when discussing how synthetic biology relates to concerns of uncertainty. As team member Edoardo noted:

“Uncertainty is what pushes the scientist towards doing more research […]. That’s why iGEM pushes [the iGEM teams] so much to safety […], [that] is because they want [us] to think about it […], [that] we thought enough about it to take away as much as we can [away] of the uncertainty […]”